Don't Say a Word...

Or: Who’s Afraid of Ronan O’Casey?

Who? Who indeed. Who even remembers him? It’s not a name that might be instantly familiar, but bear with me. Ronan O’Casey was a Canadian actor/producer who enjoyed a long and varied career in film, television and in the theatre. One of his more ‘interesting’ screen roles was that of the corpse in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Yes, really. A minor part in the finished movie, it would appear that considerably more footage was originally planned, elaborating on his character’s affair with the woman, Jane, played by Vanessa Redgrave. Although scripted, none of this additional footage was shot, after the production was shut down prematurely by producer Carlo Ponti. O’Casey’s only scenes were the candid moments in the park glimpsed at a distance by David Hemmings, his only close-up, a brief cutaway shot of the dead body…

Elsewhere on the big screen, O’Casey’s roles were mostly of the minor supporting variety, but on television he was rather more visible, securing a key role in ITV’s early comedy series The Larkins, followed a few years later by a stint as host of two television gameshows. Which brings us back to our title…

Don’t Say a Word was a short-lived charades-based gameshow, running for just two seasons in 1963 and 1964, with a format similar to the later and better-remembered Give Us a Clue. There’s very little information available about the series, with only odd references online, and the most I’ve been able to locate comes from editions of the TVTimes.

The series began on Thursday, 13^th June 1963, and occupied the 7.00pm slot which had become an established home for half-hour gameshows (Take Your Pick, Double Your Money and others of similar ilk). The format appears to have involved chairman O’Casey miming ‘memorable’ phrases which two celebrity teams then had to guess, with none of the participants able to utter a word during the proceedings. The opposing teams comprised Jill Browne, Harry Fowler and Libby Morris on one side, versus Kenneth Connor, Glen Mason and Una Stubbs on the other. And Stubbs, of course, provides a link with the show’s later, 1970s incarnation. The TV Times listing also promised the inclusion of ‘two special guests.’

My earliest television memories are from 1963 and ‘64. I’m not sure in which year I first encountered it, but I certainly saw Don’t Say a Word, and retained a memory of it for years after. The reason it remained in my memory was quite basic. I was afraid of Ronan O’Casey. I had no idea of his name, but I vividly remembered the host of the programme looking directly into camera and saying – quite pointedly – ‘Don’t say a word!’ His mugging and mute miming no doubt also contributed to his ‘scariness’, but I think my reaction had more to do with the way he seemed to directly address the viewer. A TV host saying, into camera, ‘Don’t say a word’ probably came across as an admonishing adult, a schoolmaster figure, perhaps (and I hadn’t even started school!)

Viewers were invited to send in their own suggested phrases to stump the teams, and this may well explain the reason why O’Casey spoke so directly into camera. I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone address the viewer in this way before, and I think I must have found it somewhat intimidating. Either way, for some reason or other, I took an almost instant dislike to Ronan O’Casey, who with his prematurely greying hair (a trait of his Irish lineage) looked quite distinctive on the black and white screen. I’m pretty sure that I remember wanting to leave the room whenever the programme came on. Fortunately for me, 1964 was the last season of Don’t Say a Word, although O’Casey returned the following year fronting a ‘guess the lyrics’ gameshow called Sing a Song of Sixpence (the title giving some idea of the kind of prize money offered by the average ITV quiz in those days). I remained utterly oblivious to this latter outing until I unearthed it while trawling TVTimes listings for this article. But the accompanying photo of O’Casey and co-host Anne Nightingale rang a long-silenced Pavlovian bell. This is how he looked as the host of Don’t Say a Word.

O'Casey as host of ITV's Sing a Song of Sixpence (1965) with co-host Anne Nightingale (and yes, I believe it is the same Annie Nightingale who later became a Radio One DJ)

It’s highly unlikely that anything survives of either series. O’Casey himself died as recently as 2012, but had been more or less retired from showbusiness since the early ’80s. DSAW gets a mention in his Wikipedia entry, and the Guardian obituary penned by his son, but otherwise it remains an obscurity, utterly obliterated by the passage of time. In fact, I mention it only because it illustrates a facet of memory: we don’t necessarily remember the good things from childhood, and the commonplace often doesn’t even register. But anything vaguely disturbing or scary is retained forever. Perverse, but true. I have no doubt that O’Casey was a genial, avuncular host, but to a three-year-old kid, unable to comprehend what was going on, both he and the programme were bewildering and unsettling. I didn’t like being confused by what I saw, and the sight of silent mumming on the TV screen was probably a bit too much to take, even in the seemingly benign context of a gameshow.

My memory of Don’t Say a Word is dredged from the deepest recesses of my recollection, but it belongs with a ‘spike’ of similar TV-related memories from around the same time: Will Hutchins as Sugarfoot on Saturday evenings (followed by the debut of Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks); The Littlest Hobo and No Time for Sergeants on Sunday teatime; Space Patrol and Bob Monkhouse with his old movies (also on Sundays); and my dad talking tantalisingly about a cool-sounding TV series called ‘The Aeroplane Story’ that was on too late for me to see (in fact he meant ITV’s boardroom drama The Plane Makers). All this and Alec Douglas-Home on the BBC news (he had just taken over from Harold Macmillan as Tory Party Leader and Prime Minister).

These were glimpses of an adult world that felt sophisticated and out of reach. I knew the likes of The Saint and Danger Man, but only from snatches of their opening titles and pre-credits. And TV coverage was also beginning to make me aware of events like the 1964 Olympics, staged in Tokyo. There was a wider world out there, which television was slowly revealing. Then as now, some of that world was intriguing, some of it incomprehensible, and some of it scary – for whatever reason. I wonder how many of today’s three-year-olds stare unknowingly at the television screen and get that same scary feeling from the sight of Donald Trump? 

Twentieth Century Boy

A montage of Marc created for the Network DVD release of his ITV series.

‘There’s a pop group called Tyrannosaurus Rex...’

…so said the pretty young student teacher who’d been seconded into our form as a classroom assistant. She'd seen me drawing the prehistoric creature in my ‘Topic Book’ (a hazelnut in every bite), and it was the autumn of 1970. I remember her as being trendy in appearance, with the then-fashionable short hairstyle soon to be sported by Jo Grant in Dr. Who. Our actual form teacher, a middle-aged frump, wouldn't have known the pop group from their prehistoric namesake, but this ‘bright young thing’ was exactly the type to appreciate the proto-hippie band, long championed by John Peel in his ‘perfumed garden’.

This was very likely the first time I heard of the band that, within a matter of months would be re-christened T Rex. I’ve long suspected that palentologists later adopted this ‘cooler’ nomenclature for official purposes, as the books I owned in the 1960s always referred to the dino-king as simply Tyrannosaurus, only occasionally adding the ‘Rex’ suffix. T Rex, then, was seemingly, the creation of Marc Bolan, along with his whole glam rock dandy persona.

The recent publicity surrounding the 40th anniversary of Bolan’s death has prompted me to reflect on whether the man and his music meant anything to me back in the day...

My earliest memory of the band seems to come shortly after hearing of their existence in the schoolroom, and I’m fairly certain they were still in their ‘cross-legged and bongos’ phase at that point. Whatever incarnation of the band I saw, it was on Top of the Pops, and the song must have been Ride a White Swan, by which time they had adopted the shorthand version of the name by which they would become world famous. I didn’t care for Ride a White Swan then or now, and it’s little wonder, considering that it was apparently inspired by Mungo Jerry’s hit In the Summertime which had reached number one a few months previously. As you may know from an earlier entry, I consider In the Summertime to be the nadir of popular music, and Swan... with its whimsical, chugalong melody clearly shares some of its DNA.

Fortunately, the band dropped this ‘electric jug band’ style for its subsequent releases, and the full-on glam T Rex sound definitely felt of the moment when records like Get It On and Twentieth Century Boy appeared in the charts. I didn’t buy either of them, nor indeed have I ever owned any T Rex recordings, but I didn’t object to hearing them in the Sunday chart rundown, nor to the sight of Bolan strutting and swaggering on Top of the Pops. Bolan’s appearances seem to typify TOTP of the 1972-73 era, complete with its crazy ‘solarized’ camera effects, which were always seen to particularly good effect with that mane of hair haloed against the studio lights. For all this, I knew at the time that, alongside Gary Glitter, T Rex wasn’t really my kind of thing. Perhaps I sensed the massive ego at work, or was somehow aware of Bolan taking himself too seriously, but for me, the glam band of choice was always Slade (or ‘the Slade’ as we referred to them back then).

Not so for a school friend of mine, who absolutely idolized Bolan, and worshipped T Rex to the exclusion of all others. We toyed for a while with the idea of getting some kind of band together, but he was too much in thrall to his idol (especially his Tolkeinesque early phase), and I to mine (the Beatles) for us to be able to carve out much common ground. He gave me a few copies of TV21, though, so that was okay...

My own favourite T Rex waxing was probably Solid Gold Easy Action, which charted at a time when the top twenty felt like almost wall-to-wall good stuff (early 1973), and was a welcome addition to the year’s various 12th birthday party bashes. Just a year later, with his glittering star now in the descendant, Bolan, with immaculate timing, gave us Teenage Dream. I’d just turned thirteen and we had this in the charts, to say nothing of Alice Cooper’s Teenage Lament ‘74. Frankly, I felt somewhat embarassed at having my new teen status so much in the pop spotlight.

I didn’t really notice the gradual decline of T Rex. Their absence from the charts seemed more or less par for the course at the time. In retrospect, one can look back and see a pattern – the years of obscurity followed by the sudden rise to fame, popularity and status as a pop icon, followed by the inevitable decline. It’s a career trajectory that has been followed by many others, and at the time it felt more or less like the natural order of things for any of pop’s flavours of the month to be cast aside as soon as the next big thing came along. Even the mighty Slade felt like a spent force by 1974, and glam, like all pop trends, enjoyed no more than two to three years of popularity before dwindling into nostalgic oblivion.

It’s hard to say what, if anything, took its place. From 1974 to 1977 there seemed something of a power vacuum in the pop charts, as an ‘anything goes’ mentality took hold. What was the defining sound of those years? Probably pomp rock, but its only notable chart entries came courtesy of Queen. A new kind of easy-on-the-ear pop was emerging, with Abba leading the way, and the glam rock stars of a few years before were forced to adapt or perish. As things turned out, Bolan did both.

His attempt to adjust to the changing musical climate came less in the form of his actual recorded work than his championing of new young bands like The Jam, who appeared on his short-lived ITV show. Bolan, introducing them, was still clad in a decidedly glam-era skin-tight glitter suit, corkscrew hair and all, but he was obviously drawn to the new sounds, and went out of his way to make room for the young pretenders on his show. I never saw it myself, as it aired too early in the evening, but I later made my own very small contribution to the legend by designing the sleeve for its release on DVD (and when I say ‘designing’, I mean I slapped on a huge picture of Bolan, to which I appended a photoshopped version of the logo from the TV series).

To me, one of the most significant facts about T Rex at the time was the band’s own record label, which I would frequently come across whilst browsing through remaindered chart singles in Woolworths. Not many bands had their own label, I thought, apart from the Beatles and Apple, and this small fact seemed to confer some significance on the efforts of Mr. B. I did, however, read the piece about Bolan and T Rex that appeared in 1972’s Story of Pop book (a compilation of articles from the eponymous magazine), and was somewhat amused by the sight of the young ‘Marc Feld’, with oiled hair, pictured as a ‘sharp mod’ in a couple of vintage photos (frankly, his appearance put me more in mind of Jimmy Clitheroe...)

I’m afraid that when I heard the news of Bolan’s demise – via the Birmingham Evening Mail – it didn’t mean a great deal to me. It would have been more shocking had he taken his last bow at the height of his fame, but by 1977 – five years on from the band’s high water mark – T Rex felt like yesterday’s men. By comparison, I remember being more ‘shocked and stunned’ at the news, in summer 1973, of Slade drummer Don Powell’s car smash which left Powell in a coma and his girlfriend dead. At the time of the accident, there was every expectation of Powell’s not pulling through, and although he eventually made a full recovery, the incident served as a reminder that pop idols are mere mortals like the rest of us, as did the premature death of Bolan four years later.

Bolan had, apparently, rather foreseen his own premature demise (although I refuse to believe the story told by his manager that he literally imagined himself dying in a Mini as opposed to the Porsche that killed James Dean). And although he may well have gone on to greater things, re-inventing himself, perhaps, in the manner of his contemporary, Bowie, he could just as easily have slid into a ‘fat Elvis’ twilight, a fate which had been somewhat foreshadowed by his physical appearance a year or so prior to his death.

T Rex may never have been my favourite band, but they definitely felt like an integral part of what was happening in pop at the time, and let’s face it, the seventies wouldn’t have been the seventies without Marc Bolan and his corkscrew hair...

The Songs That Chose Us… continued

Dreamer

I don’t think there can be many pop singles that are genuine one-offs: songs that sound like nothing else, ever. But one such must surely be Supertramp’s 1975 single, Dreamer. The song, lifted from the preceding year’s Crime of the Century album, entered the UK charts on February 15^th, 1975, reaching its highest position of nunber 13 on 8^th March... the day after my birthday. But I did not receive this single as a present, nor its parent album. I wasn’t even sure if I actually liked it. Not yet, anyway...

For many years, Dreamer has had a potent nostalgic quality for me. It’s a song I don’t mind hearing time and time over, and there aren’t many records I can say that about. For a long time, the sound of it conjured up two images: one was seeing the band miming it on Top of the Pops, a performance where every member seemed to be equipped with a keyboard. This struck me as a novelty at the time, as did the sight of John Helliwell playing a wine glass, an item inaudible on the record (to my ears, at any rate). The other image Dreamer has always conjured up for me is of a blue, summer sky, with small fluffy clouds scudding along on the breeze. A ‘dreamlike’ image? Maybe, but I think there’s another reason for it, and I’ve had to go back to weather records to confirm it.

The first three months of 1975 were notable for their lack of sunshine. Here in the midlands, we received less than half the average in January and February, and a below average amount in March. My recollections of the time are of a generally dull and overcast outlook, enduring since the new year and lasting pretty well until the beginning of spring. That’s not to say that the sun never shone, but when it did, the effect was somewhat more noticeable.

I was at school during these months, arriving in semi-darkness and going home in the lengthening twilight. We didn’t take much notice of the weather indoors. Then, one morning, I found myself sent on an errand to fetch some books from a store room. It was always an interesting experience to walk the corridors between lessons, where a strange silence held sway. The store room was somewhere I’d never been before, and its single window looked out across a lawn belonging to the old art college next door. In the course of collecting the required texts, I paused for a moment at the window to take in the view. On that particular morning, the relentless grey conditions had abated temporarily, and a dusty blue sky could be seen, with small rags of white cloud driven across it by a light breeze.

I think Dreamer must have come into my head at that moment, because the glimpse of spring, the blue sky and the clouds became fixed to the song in my subconscious. For that moment, I became the subject of the lyric: ‘Can you put your hands in your head?’ I felt I was looking out of time through that window, felt as if all past and future days were gathered out there in that one moment of surprising light. My own future was an unguessable void. I could have been something out of this world... but of course, I was dreaming a lie.

Dreamer was in the charts at the time: I’d probably heard it within days via the Sunday teatime chart rundown, or the band’s TOTP appearance. But I didn’t rush out and get it. In fact, it was the song that got me, working its way down to some deep, inaccessible place over the coming years. Nostalgia is never an instant fix; you need four or five years to feel it properly. And so it was that, sometime in the summer of 1979, in recognition of the song’s evocative power, I finally caved in and bought Crime of the Century.

Supertramp mime Dreamer on Top of the Pops, with a set suggesting the Crisis, What Crisis album sleeve.  Note the wine glass on the corner of John Helliwell's keyboard.

There were lots of things about Dreamer that I shouldn’t have liked: the falsetto vocals, the reliance on keyboards (especially electric piano, a sound I took a long while to appreciate), and the complete absence of guitars (other than the bass). In retrospect, these are some of the aspects that make the song unique. For it is. Unique not only amongst Supertramp’s recorded history, but in the entire history of pop music. There is no other recording that sounds remotely like it. Most records follow a production or writing formula that lends them a kind of house style – the jingle-jangle of the Byrds, for instance, derives from the Beatles, whose own sound derived from the likes of Chuck Berry... and so on. Supertramp’s other singles are all much more obvious products of the pop/rock genre, with prominent acoustic guitars featuring on several, alongside sax, bass, drums, the uniquitous keyboards. Dreamer sounds like none of them. It isn’t even structured like a conventional pop song. I’m going to take a minute here to unpick the song... to get my hands in its head, oh no…

It opens in the bright, optimistic key of D Major, with the rhythmical electric piano vamp that provides a musical backbone to the composition. Rodger Hodgson had, in fact, written the song on a Wurlitzer electric piano (widely revered by musicians for its sharp, signature tone), and his original home demo, featuring cardboard box percussion, was re-created by the band for their studio recording. He was nineteen at the time of writing, and this naivety perhaps accounts for the song’s experimental, unorthodox structure.

A verse/chorus establishes the subject and the narrator’s point of view: he’s addressing someone who hasn’t really got their head together. Next comes a surprising chord change, rising from G to A flat and B flat, on the way to the new key of C Major (‘what a day, a year, a life it is’). This section, feeling more like a bridge than a chorus, is repeated before a return to the original D Major. The narrator is losing patience with his subject: ‘you stupid little dreamer/ now you put your head in your hands, oh no.’

Now the band breaks out, with an instrumental section featuring a dinstinctive bass figure and dry, minimal drums (imitating Hodgson’s home-made percussion). Reaching the bridge again, the journey to C major now settles into a new key centre for the song. Percussion drops back, and keyboard again comes to the fore in a small instrumental passage that leads into the heart of the song. Now, for the first time, the ‘dreamer’ tries to explain himself to the narrator with a second vocal (‘If I could be someone’) setting up a ‘call and response’ with Hodgson and the rest of the band. The ‘dreamer’ wants to take us all with him (‘come on and dream, dream along’), wants us to wallow in the safety of C Major, and so it seems, until a crescendo (na-na-na-na) that bursts back into the cold light of D Major and Hodgson, the narrator, comes back to the fore. The repeated verse/chorus from the song’s opening builds, with layered backing vocals, until the end comes, sudden and surprising, leaving us with nothing but a dreamlike, tinkling celeste, as we wonder if, in fact, the dreamer has won the day.

What’s it all about, anyway? Is Hodgson challenging the lure of the drugs that had become so much a part of rock culture? Or is he adopting a more pragmatic persona, delivering a rebuke to a friend who just can’t get a grip on reality? Perhaps he’s doing both. I didn’t ask these questions at the time. All I knew was that the song had attached itself to me like a musical limpet mine. Every so often, in the years since then, it’s gone off in an explosion of blue sky and wide lawns and unexpected March sunshine. 

I couldn’t see it at the time, aged just fourteen, but the song was my destiny. It was speaking to me. And my subconscious was listening…